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Scientists Have Invented Paper That You Can Print With Light, Erase With Heat, and Reuse 80 Times (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Nearly 1% of carbon emissions annually can be attributed to paper production, even though we recycle much of the paper we produce. Yadong Yin has a solution. He and his colleagues at the University of California at Riverside have invented a type of paper that can be printed on using just light, erased by heating, and reused up to 80 times. Yin created nanoparticles, which are a million times smaller than the thickness of human hair, with the dye Prussian blue, or its chemical analogues, and titanium oxide, which is commonly used in white wall paint. This mixture is then applied to normal paper. When the coating is exposed to ultraviolet light, electrons from titanium oxide move to the dye in the nanoparticle. This addition of electrons makes the blue dye turn white. Focusing the ultraviolet light into shapes, you can print white words on a blue background -- or blue words on a white background, which are easier to read. If left alone, the paper reverts to its original state in five days. That process can be accelerated by heating the paper to 120 C (250 F) for 10 minutes.
Now all we need is a new printer that doesn't jam when the paper is not perfectly smooth.
Well, no. Not quite.
All we truly need to fix the problem of printer jams is a society that doesn't believe in going backwards with technology in order to feed some perverse addiction of putting ones and zeros on paper.
While I applaud the new research for helping with carbon emissions, it's pretty sad when we've been talking about "paperless" for 20 fucking years and have still failed to actually do it in damn near every aspect.
And yes, it's pretty easy to do. When gas rose to over $4/gallon, people started looking for alternate means of transportation. When you make something expensive enough, innovation happens. Or in the case of going paperless, common sense.
Only your durability / hardcopy / archive argument really hold water and that's exactly what this ‘invention’ is useless at. ...). ... material.
* Paper is expensive. You don't realise that because you aren't paying the price in the store. But it takes up space, ordering time and other overhead and it turns out to be much more expensive than any digital-based solution (be it e-reader, computer,
* My e-reader also ‘just works’ (battery lasts forever, can write on pages) and people can no longer live without their phones anyway so for all intents and purposes they just work too.
* Big paper sizes were never there for usability; people hate it. Columns are a coping mechanism, but they only go so far. Big paper sizes are used because they're slightly cheaper, but even now I notice some newspapers are switching to half size because their readership prefers it. The ones that don't simply cannot afford it.
As I see it, for most purposes there's a more-or-less two-way split happening between use cases that were formerly covered by paper:
* Temporary reading / graphing /
* Archival storage.
The ‘invention’ discussed here is useless for both. It's useless.
It can be reused/reprinted 80 times. It doesn't say it will stay wrinkle/crease free for 80 reuses. And when it does get thrown out, it's full of ferric ferrocyanide, which is fairly toxic.
Any amount of wear on the paper and nobody will want it second-hand. Or, nobody will buy their own paper because it's too expensive. They just won't return the paper back to the convention staff, etc.
Pointing things out should not involve burning other peoples property or threatening physical violence. And there is a difference between saying all X are Y and actually acting like all X are Y or even going around referring to all X as Y. It's not like anyone could know all X, except when X is a very small group.
I find Milo to be funny and the reactions to him even more so.